A rather curious incident took place with respect to this book, which annoyed me greatly at the time, because I was quite unacquainted with the queer crotchets and imaginary grievances that would-be literary persons often take into their heads. Somebody wrote to complain that he had written (not published) a story upon the same lines, and even incidents, as 'The Family Scapegrace,' just before its appearance in the columns of Chambers's Journal, and the delicate inference he drew was that, whether in my capacity of editor or otherwise, I must have somehow got hold of it. He gave the exact date of the conclusion of his own composition, which was prior to the commencement of my story in the Journal.
Conscious of innocence, but troubled by so disagreeable an imputation, I laid the matter before Robert Chambers.
'You are not so versed in the ways of this class of person as I am,' he said, smiling; 'but since he has been so injudicious as to give a date, I think we can put him out of court. I am one of those methodical individuals who keep a diary.' And on reference to it, he found that I had read him my story long before that of my traducer, according to his own account, had left his hands.
It was a small matter, but proved a useful lesson to me, for there is a great deal of imposture of this kind going on in the literary world; sometimes, as perhaps in this case, the result of mere egotistic fancy, but also sometimes begotten by the desire to levy blackmail.
The above, so far as I can remember them, are the circumstances under which I published my first novel. I am sorry to add that poor Tickeracandua, to whom it owed so much, subsequently met the very fate in reality which I had assigned to him in fiction; though as good a fellow as many I have met out of a show, he came to the same end as 'Don't Care' did in the nursery story, and was 'eaten (or at all events killed) by lions.'
'THE WRECK OF THE "GROSVENOR"'
BY W. CLARK RUSSELL
